All along we’ve been referring to the Sherman in the Sandstone Heritage Trust collection simply as a 'Sherman Mk4'. Apparently, it’s not as simple as that, according to William Marshall, who knows his Military Vehicles well!
William wrote:
Your Sherman seems to be a postwar modification, this happened quite a lot when the UDF started to run out of spares for the Sherman tanks. It has a M4-1B 105mm Howitzer turret, the hull is that of a Sherman Firefly 1C Hybrid which is quite unique in the sense that it is the combination of a cast and welded hull.
Interesting to see that it still has the traveling lock for the 17 Pdr on the front hull. The .30 Browning in the hull was removed (welded close with plate) as it had to make space for the radios which were relocated from the turret as the 17 pdr took up all the space in the turret. The British could only make the 17 pdr fit into a T23 turret, which was the biggest turret available by installing it upside down. Your tank also seems to have a no-standard engine hull conversion.
Wouldn’t we all like to do this to a taxi some days?
I asked William for more info on the Sherman Fives my father wrote about in his poem:
The M4A4 Sherman V was a completely different beast, as it had the Chrysler A57 Mutibank engine which had five production 6-cylinder car engines arranged around a common crank. This design had 30 cylinders with 5 belt driven water pumps, you can imagine that it did not fit into a standard Sherman hull, so they extended the hull and created a longer version to accommodate it. An identifying feature was the spacing of the wheels which had larger gaps between them than the standard Sherman tanks. Various other internal modifications wrt the fuel tanks also had to be made.
The UDF forces in WW2, 6 SA Armd Division was issued with the M4A1(75mm), M4IB(105mm) and M7(105mm) Priest and for anti-tank purposes the M10 with the 3" main gun.
Andre Steenkamp sent in this picture recently of an SSB Sherman hit during the battle of Celleno, SSB’s ‘Baptism of Fire’. Two hits seem to have caused the hull machine gunner some grief. The fabricated hull can be seen, quite different from the example in the Sandstone Heritage Trust collection.
My father was not far away from Celleno at the time, as he describes in his book ‘The Story of my War’:
In that way, people either survived to fight again, or were killed!
William Marshall continues:
During Nov 44 the M4A1(75mm) tanks were replaced with the M4A1(76mm) and the M41C(17pdr). The M7(105mm) Priests were also replaced with the Canadian Sexton as the ammo was causing logistical problems for the Division. During Apr 45 some of the M10(3") were converted to the 17pdr version called a 17Pdr M10SP (British designation Achilles), these were never used as the war ended during their conversion.
Hope this gives some background
Regards
William
Many thanks to William Marshall for this detailed information!
Andy Selfe
February 2010